Cuban farmers fret over pace of reform

HAVANA, (Reuters) – Despite steps to expand private  farming, Cuba is contracting food supplies for 2011 much as it  has for decades, showing the limits of reforms and dimming  prospects for big increases in output, farmers said this week.

While President Raul Castro’s government is paying more for  food and allowing farmers to sell non-contracted items directly  to Cubans, the state still has a monopoly over the purchase and  sale of about 70 percent of the farmers’ output, they said.

Communist authorities have decided what crops to grow and  livestock to raise and been the sole provider of supplies to  private farmers since most land was nationalized in the 1960s.

They purchase and distribute most of the country’s food  through contracts obliging farmers to sell to the state.

Castro’s reforms have allowed more local decision-making  about which contracted foods can be grown in given areas and  more freedom to sell some fruits and vegetables. But, said one farmer, “We still are not free from the  regulations that hold us back.”

“I think they are worried there will be chaos in production  and distribution if they let farmers do as they please,” he  said, like others asking that his name not be used.

Farmers had hoped the reforms would allow them to freely  sell more of their produce, which would encourage more output,  but they said they had only a little more flexibility.

“The state is contracting for 21 products in 2011, which is  a little better than this year when they contracted for  everything but leafy vegetables,” another farmer said in a  telephone interview from the provinces.

The contracted items include most of the staples of the  Cuban diet, ranging from rice, beans, corn, root vegetables,  onions and garlic to some types of bananas, citrus fruit,  tomatoes, beef, pork and dairy products.

“The government is obliged to buy up … what it contracts,  and then it can purchase more if both parties agree, or we are  free to sell what is left to whomever, but only in our local  municipality,” the farmer said of the 2011 plans.

Castro has made rescuing agriculture from a decades-old  crisis a priority since taking over for his brother Fidel in  2008, but has yet to significantly loosen the state’s monopoly  in favor of market forces.

Cuba’s food production fell 7.5 percent in the first half  of the year despite the reforms, and even as the cash-strapped  country cut food imports.
“The contracting system should be reduced to the  indispensable so that most production can be sold on the basis  of supply and demand,” local agriculture expert Armando Nova  wrote in Temas Magazine, the most outspoken government  sponsored publication, earlier this year.